Sometimes the onus of trying to stick with a healthy diet can be overwhelming. Not to mention confusing. First, dietary gurus and scientists change their stories. A while back you couldn’t eat eggs or even look at them without risking a heart attack or worse. Now eggs are considered a 70-calorie wonder food, packed full of protein, vitamins, minerals, and foliate. They can raise your good cholesterol. Something about the choline in them helps your brain function better. Lutein can save your eyesight. The list of cackleberry benefits goes on.

Then there’s the options in what you eat, and what mantra or line of reasoning you follow. There’s the keto diet that turned prime rib and bacon into health foods so you could, umm, burn more fat. There’s the gluten-free fad, which arose out of a genuine need for a significant number of people with celiac disease, and then became an economic tsunami. It seems to be receding. While some changes in food recommendations, like the value of eating eggs, occur because better science, improved technology, and more thorough studies improve our overall understanding of things, others, like tv dinners, fondue, and frozen yogurt were simply food fads, driven by advertising, and by the appearance of a new and seemingly cool product.

The new breed of plant-based foods appear to fall into the same “Wow, what a nifty new product” food fad category similar to fondue or perhaps the pineapple upside-down cake of the early 1900s, which miraculously coincided with the Hawaiian Pineapple Company’s invention of a machine capable of peeling, coring and slicing 100 pineapples per minute. What to do with all those pineapple slices? Find and heavily promote a new food that tastes good and uses them, of course.

Similarly, the new “plant-based meats” products Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger are heavily advertised and promoted, and right now seem to be riding a wave of PR and prosperity. Beyond Meat’s stock prices skyrocketed from an IPO of $25 to a high of $234. Both “burgers” are touted as a way to save the Earth from climate change. Their promotional materials, advertising, packaging and TV interviews intimate that they are healthier for people and the planet than the evil methane-producing, rain forest destroying, global-warming livestock on the shelves next to them.

But are they? Or is this just a profit-driven product surfing the tsunami of global environmental concerns?

The facts of these products suggest the second motive.

They are not good for us. They are not good for the planet. They are high in saturated fat—with each 4 oz. Beyond Burger delivering 30 percent of your daily-recommended amount of saturated fat, and the Impossible Burger delivering 40%. They are ultra processed, and their production involves known or suspected carcinogens. Impossible Burger includes GMOs. And while their corporate representatives and founders point fingers at cattle that graze on destroyed Amazon rain forest, these same environmentally concerned corporate titans somehow fail to point out that their products, which rely on coconut oil, import their contents from half way around the world. They obtain the oil–the stuff that provides wads of saturated fat in the “burgers”, from vast coconut plantations which replace native Indonesian and Philippine rain forest.

What we are seeing is an explosive and destructive fad fueled by hype and misinformation, and driven by a laudable wish to halt climate change. But this fad is destructive to environment and health, and not, as these products claim, the salvation of the planet.

Rural agricultural communities, including Wallowa County, should learn from this consumer stampede to halt climate change. We raise cows and crops. We manage grasslands. In fact, perhaps the most valuable thing that we manage is a vast and underutilized carbon sequestration system. If we want urban America to flock to our products with the same enthusiasm they show for Impossible Burgers, perhaps it’s time to tout the values of sequestering carbon in range land, pastures and crops. Perhaps it’s time to measure, improve, and brag about how much carbon our grasslands are soaking up, as well as how healthy our product is. If carbon sequestration is the name of the new economic game, we can play it as well or better than Beyond Meat and Impossible, improbable, imposter Burger. It’s time to get serious. Game on.